Outside-In Marketing: Using Big Data to Guide Your Content Marketing

by James Mathewson, Mike Moran

Marketing has always been about "me": my brand, my product, my company. But "inside-out" marketing no longer works: your customers simply won't tolerate it anymore. You need to transform your marketing to "outside in." Every message you deliver must engage, fascinate, and motivate the right audiences, because you start and finish with what they already care about. Your marketing itself must provide value to customers -- whether they buy today, next month, or far into the future. How do you know what messages will do that? How do you get those messages past tough new digital gatekeepers? You start here, with Outside In Marketing.
Two world-renowned digital marketing thought leaders will show how to integrate content marketing with Big Data to deliver exactly the right messages to exactly the right customers and influencers. IBM's James Mathewson and Converseon's Mike Moran reveal how to make the most of today's Big Data algorithms to shape your messages and get them past Google and Facebook. You'll find up-to-the-minute practices, techniques, recommendations, guidelines, and metrics for mining the language your customers already use, so you can engage them on their terms, with their words. Mathewson and Moran show how to:
Go beyond "guess and hope" to transform your marketing practices, campaigns, and channels with Big Data
Recognize how Google uses natural language processing, machine learning, and data analytics "against" you - and overcome the obstacles they create
Infuse search and social data into product development from its very inception, so you can tightly align your offerings with customer needs
Measure campaign results more accurately, and feed metrics right back into practices for iterative improvement
Discover exactly what content is working now, and what's failing
Uncover powerful new opportunities to develop discoverable, shareable content
Go beyond high-quality content: align all your marketing and communications practices to support outside-in marketing
Leverage advanced applications of text analytics and machine learning, including Panda, Penguin, Caffeine, and sophisticated sentiment analysis
Build standout web and mobile sites based on all you've learned about your customers
Find the right mix, cadence, and combination of social platforms to maximize ROI

Genres: Business

208 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2016

Reviews

[Bryson Meunier · Rating 3 out of 5]

Relevance, Audience and Search by James Mathewson is one of my favorite SEO and web writing books, and I've bought multiple copies of it over the years for team members and myself. The principles in it allowed me to better articulate the change in digital marketing that I had been seeing over the years and distill that into a keyword research and audience segmentation product for the agency I worked for at the time. I still recommend it to SEOs I know, even six years after its original publication and in spite of the fact that some of the tactics in it are a bit outdated.

I'm mentioning this because I had extremely high expectations for Outside-In Marketing, and was inevitably a little disappointed when I finished it. Overall it is a nice update to Audience, Relevance and Search, but focuses more on content marketing, social media and other forms of inbound marketing that have emerged in the six years since Mathewson's last book. He and his co-author Mike Moran do provide plenty of case studies to drive their points home, but at this point in my career it's not really a lesson I need to be taught. Many of the examples were from authors (like Karen McGrane and Kristina Halvorson) whose books I've already read, and the examples didn't really shed new light on the issues they addressed. Yes, inbound marketing and content marketing can be effective when you're doing them correctly, and if you are a busy executive who is unfamiliar with these concepts and don't do these things on a regular basis like I do then this book can help you quite a bit. But for me it was about 200 pages of preaching to the choir.

I liked the book, and am glad I read it. James Mathewson is a brilliant marketer and if you haven't read Audience, Relevance and Search this may be a better place to start since the book was just published this year and is more up to date. But for experienced digital marketers it's probably not necessary beyond the great enterprise SEO, social and content marketing examples in the book.

[Chris Abraham]

This is an interesting book because it's written by enterprise-level Search Engine Marketing (SEM) geniuses. They eat big data for breakfast every day.

What they've learned is that too many companies are spending all of their time and treasure following UI and UX trends and redesigning their sites based on the whims of creative directors and not nearly enough resources on using big data to sort out what's working on your site and doing more of that.

Too many agencies are recommending throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Moran and Mathewson have figured out how to make search marketing, content marketing, and inbound marketing actually work for you by taking the guesswork and opinion out of the mix and relying, instead, on A/B tests, data-tracking, and strong analysis of the data you're already collecting to win at search, to win at content, and to win at business.

The book is thin, essential, and maybe should even be proprietary. There's no BS but don't second guess them or assume that you, too, can't leverage the sort of tools and strategies that Mike and James do.

They're giving away $100,000 of consulting for the $12.